Create Image and Video Sitemaps for Google

Image and Video SitemapsIn this article we are going discuss how to create two popular XML sitemap formats, image sitemaps (first half) and video sitemaps (second half). Both types can often help your website to increase its traffic through blended search and/or specifc image/video search.

Note: As both the Google image sitemap and Google video sitemap formats are extensions of the standard XML sitemaps format, you can check the other articles for information about how to ping and FTP upload generated image and video sitemaps.

Introduction to Image SitemapsDoes your website contain lots of images, possibly even lots of unique images? If so, it makes good sense to create an image sitemap for search engines like Google, so you more quickly can get all the images indexed and found in image related searches. This tutorial will show you how to create image sitemaps in a few simple steps using our sitemapping software.

Find All Images in Your WebsiteFirst make sure you configure the sitemap generator tool to collect all images during the initial website crawl.

Verify The Image SitemapAs Google Webmaster Tools reports the number of page URLs in all XML sitemap file kinds including image sitemaps (even those with no images associated) it can sometimes be difficult to verify theactual number of images submitted if you experiment with different sitemap generator tools. Here is a couple of things you can do:

Try perform a search/replace of <image:loc> in the generated XML image sitemap file. Most text editors gives you a count of found/replaced text items.

Create Video SitemapsBefore creating video sitemaps, you have to know what they are Video sitemaps file kind is a Google extension of XML sitemaps. If you do not know how to create these, check the other guides at this website. Video sitemaps help search engines like Google to identify video content, video players and primary pages for your videos. This guide explains how to build video sitemaps in a few easy steps using our sitemap creator tool.

Crawl Site to Find All VideosFirst use the video sitemap crawl preset to ensure the sitemap generator tool finds and keeps all video related URLs during website scan.

Verify Video SitemapsGoogle Webmaster Tools can reports the number of page URLs in all XML sitemap files. However, strictly speaking, that is rarely what you will want to know for pure video sitemap files which only list page URLs that has video content. Instead, you will probably want to know how many videos were found and submitted to Google. Here is a trick to find the number of submitted videos in case you experiment with different video sitemap generator tools: